I had hoped that SpaceX might hold higher principles :(

Why would you say that?

There are more of them in existence than any other cube.

Sure about that?

Maybe it's just me, but "attack against weak passwords" seems like a perfectly cromulent use of the word 'hack'. In the "gain unauthorized access to a computer system" sense, anyway.

Reading between the lines, I think this is a company that specializes in greasing palms/pulling levers in Congress and the Senate, as well as constructing sophisticated internet campaigns that include releases to key susceptible news outlets/columnists and hiring fake posters to post on certain widely read comment boards.

So, highly-paid, professional astroturfers.

Cost reduction, maybe. It really involves management that is afraid to trust the very people it hired, and wants to keep them under constant surveillance. It's the modern way: trust no-one, watch everyone. It never seems to occur to such types that if you hire good people, pay them well, treat them well, and give them reasonable goals, you don't need to be so paranoid.

As a long-time software developer, I know that such an environment would severely impact my ability to focus and do what I'm being paid to do. Furthermore, any employer that would trust me so little is one for whom I would not choose too work.

I suspect that China does. They just haven't had a Snowden happen to them.

Awesome Captain Kirk impression.

99% of people who depend on Node.js don't give a flying fart about what pronouns are used in COMMENTS in the library

Apparently Ben Noordhuis does.

... is to be disbanded.

I really hope you are trying to be funny.

One can always hope, but it seems we've managed to go from "climate change isn't real" to "it causes everything bad that happens."

Of course, a big enough eruption would actually trigger a global cooling trend for a while. Think Krakatoa and Mount Pinatubo.

I read that as "A Woman's Mind in a Leggy Body."

I'm going to bed now.

Sure, I know. Few things are truly novel and one has to be able to do all of it, including the grunt work. It's just that there's no point doing something original when its faster to copy, so one copies up to the point where either nobody has done it before or its just easier to reinvent it oneself than find and incorporate somebody else's solution I just took that attitude a little earlier than I was supposed to. I wasn't trying to be clever, I just wasn't ready to start working hard at the time.

Do you mean, the repeated code, or the cool professor is as likely as winning the lottery ? Either way, its more common than that.

Same thing happened to me in college, except I didnt even discuss the assignment with him. It was a lisp project and we both decided to do it as purely as possible (which at the time meant no assignments - what today would be called functional style). The end result was about 150 lines of lisp (equivalent to maybe 2k lines of C). Our code was identical except for some identifier names.

The last program I had to write in first year CS was a plagarism detector. Surprisingly easy.. just do a frequency analysis on keywords and that will get you 90% of the way there. So, I actually did this assignment unlike all the others that I had cheated on...

When I did a CS degree I cheated hard through first year.

1. I was young and lazy, my main goal was to maximize time I could spend in the pub.
2. There's no point doing something if someone else has already done it